How the Ketogenic Diet Reduces Inflammation in the Body

Believe it or not the reason
you might feel so amazing on a ketogenic diet could be because of the modulation of
inflammation within your body. I’m about to get sciency but
I’m going to break it all down so it makes perfect, easy since. I’m Thomas DeLauer with Keto-Mojo and let’s go ahead and dive in
to some inflammation science. You see, before we get in to any detail, we have to understand what
inflammation is within the body and why you feel so good
when it’s under control. You see, inflammation is
sort of like our body’s immune system response to things. Any time we have a foreign invader or we have any kind of trauma, we have an inflammatory response. A good example is acute inflammation. If you get a cut or scrape
or maybe you bump part of your body you’re gonna swollen and red and you’re going to feel that
little swelling that goes on. Well that is inflammation
in its acute form. Now we also have inflammation that happens in a chronic form or in a cellular form, which is basically the
same kind of response as on the outside of
the body but happening at a cellular level. You can see how that’s not
necessarily a good thing unless we specifically need it. If our bodies are always
overreacting to things and always sort of swollen then we’re putting ourselves
in a situation where we’re run down. Our body’s using energy for that. Now ketosis has been prove
to modulate inflammation in a lot of different subjects and a lot of different studies. But I want to help you understand by giving you a matter of reference. So this is one study is from
the Yale Medical School. And what this took a look at was exposing human immune cells to ketones, particularly, beta hydroxybutyrate, which is the main ketone
body that we see in ketosis. In fact, it’s the ketone
body that we’re measuring with the Keto-Mojo meter. And what they found is
that when they expose human immune cells to beta hydroxybutyrate, inflammatory markers went down. This is very, very powerful. It shows us that in the
presence of ketone bodies, we can control high levels
of inflammation a bit better. Specifically, in this case,
it modulated what is known as the NLRP3 inflammasome. The NLRP3 inflammasome is
a multi-protein oligomer and it’s very, very
reactive, it’s very jumpy. You see, what it does
is it sort of dictates what the rest of the immune system and the rest of the inflammatory responses in our bodies do. So if our NLRP3 inflammasome is elevated, it means that we are
going to be hypersensitive to any little responses in the body. What that means is that if
we have anything that occurs that might trigger a little
bit of an inflammatory response well it could exacerbate and create a bigger inflammatory response if our NLRP3 inflammasome is elevated. So through this study they found that that gets modulated,
that level comes down, which means that our immune system and our inflammatory
response is less jumpy and less reactive. This is good for everyone involved. And in some other interesting research, there was a doctor from
UCSF’s Neurology Department that took a look at the effect of ketones on brain inflammation. So what he did is he gave
subjects a specific chemical that would block the
absorption of glucose, forcing them to go into a ketogenic state. Now what happened in
this study was not only did inflammatory markers go down they actually went down to control levels, meaning they went down
to levels that were lower than what we would normally see. They went down to total
baseline normal levels of someone that is perfectly healthy, even in people or subjects
that were not healthy at all. Now it’s also been known on
the other side of the equation that excess glucose or
excess carbohydrates, specifically in people
that already have issues with blood sugar or are
diabetic can cause these different pro-inflammatory
markers to elevate that can eventually
lead to atherosclerosis. There’s a multitude of things
that we have to look at when we are looking at inflammation and how the ketogenic
diet can control that and help us out. But by and large, one of
the reasons that you’re probably feeling so
good is your body is not having to spend that extra
energy on its immune system. Think about having a low
grade flu all the time. A flu that you don’t even know exists but it’s occurring inside your body and all of a sudden that’s
healed, that’s gone. You’re going to feel like
you have more energy, you’re going to feel cleaner, you’re going to feel less achy. And honestly, inflammation is a big thing that we have to look at when we’re looking at the ketogenic diet. So as always, if you’re
trying to make sure that you’re in a ketogenic state and make sure you’re
maximizing your results with ketosis, you want to make sure that you’re utilizing the Keto-Mojo meter. It’s the gold standard when it comes to ketone testing and its going to ensure that you know when you’re in that
powerful state of ketosis. So as always, keep it locked in here with Keto-Mojo and I’ll see you soon.